Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



WOODS, NICHOLAS A. The Prince of Wales in Canada and the 1859 

 United States. Lond.: Bradbury and Evans. 1861. Pp. 235-252. Woods 



A very excellent account in fresh, journalistic style and graphic manner, 

 by the Times special correspondent. 



Here for a few short days — too few by far — there was a 

 temporary lull in the whirlwind of addresses, reviews, proces- 

 sions, state balls, and noisy Orangemen. The Prince lived pri- 

 vately at the pretty cottage of the late Mr. Zimmerman, and 

 several of the suite were accommodated in the rows of little 

 cottages which fill the beautiful gardens of the Clifton House 

 Hotel. The Prince for once in Canada was in private. State 

 and pomp were scattered to the winds, and he rode out and 

 walked out without a mob at his heels, and could sit and watch 

 unobserved for hours the tremendous majesty of the scenes 

 around him. It was on the whole quite as well that royalty was 

 incog, before Niagara. The shout of a mob, or the tinsel of a 

 procession, would have showed poorly by the side of that great 

 Altar of Nature, where a misty incense is always rising to heaven, 

 and the eternity of water speaks only of One. Amid that scene 

 princes, powers, and denominations are all forgotten, as you 

 stand before the Falls of Niagara, which pour down with such 

 majesty of power that you can only gaze with solemn awe upon 

 the grandest and most terrible of all God's works in nature. 

 . . . Words . . . are powerless before the stupendous 

 force and terror of this cataract, and all the wealth of language 

 would be exhausted before one could tell how the great hill of 

 waters which drops from the monstrous cliffs so smooth, so green, 

 so deep, changes ere one can mark its fall into millions of columns 

 of spray which, darting out like white fireworks, shoot down and 

 down till lost in the clouds of mist which always wrap the base 

 of the Falls in dim and grand obscurity. 



Every one expects so much from these cataracts, and 

 is so eager to see them, that, fired with the notion of a second 

 deluge, they strain their eyes in all directions as they advance 

 and catch stray glimpses of the Falls here and there, now hidden 



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